{"id":19735,"date":"2022-09-19T07:02:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-19T12:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/?p=19735"},"modified":"2022-09-28T07:05:25","modified_gmt":"2022-09-28T12:05:25","slug":"what-stood-out-at-the-berlin-biennale","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/2022\/09\/19\/what-stood-out-at-the-berlin-biennale\/","title":{"rendered":"what stood out at the berlin biennale"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

what stood out at the berlin biennale: exile is a hard job by nil yalter, maithu b\u00f9i\u2019s mathuat \u2013 MMRBX, a video installation based on a virtual reality game, and asim abdulaziz\u2019s 1941.

\u2018Asim Abdulaziz is a visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. His emerging practice explores the psychoaffective implications of living in a country ravaged by ongoing war. The photographic series Homesick (2020), for example, depicts Yemeni women in destroyed interiors, the title suggesting both a yearning to return to a time before the war as well as the morbid estrangement of living among the ceaseless ruins that are product of the conflict.

The short experimental film 1941 (2021) explores the sense of disorientation and alienation experienced by Yemenis. After learning that knitting was a significant way for women in the United States to participate in the war effort during World War II, Abdulaziz was struck by how, in contemporary Yemen, knitting as an act of solidarity in a time of war would seem entirely absurd. The repetitive nature of the hand movement guiding the needles and stitching the wool thread distracts one from pondering the past and future, locking the knitter into a timeless present. By staging the practice in Yemen, Abdulaziz draws an embodied metaphor around the quotidian experience of war\u2014captive to the logic of survival\u2014that inhibits projecting oneself into a future of self-realization. Moreover, in a gender role reversal that further accentuates the strangeness of implementing this action in Yemen, the artist cast ten men of different generations and filmed them knitting with red wool inside one of Aden\u2019s historical landmarks: a Hindu temple long abandoned to decay. He disrobed them\u2014the men are shirtless, a provocative gesture in a prudish culture, which underlines the act\u2019s absurdity. 1941 is an eloquent and compelling poetic meditation on war\u2019s prohibition of claiming agency over time and self.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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what stood out at the berlin biennale: exile is a hard job by nil yalter, maithu b\u00f9i\u2019s mathuat \u2013 MMRBX, a video installation based on a virtual reality game, and asim abdulaziz\u2019s 1941. \u2018Asim Abdulaziz is a visual artist, photographer, and filmmaker. His emerging practice explores the psychoaffective implications of living in a country ravaged … Continue reading what stood out at the berlin biennale<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[15,14,16,6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19735"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19735"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19735\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19738,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19735\/revisions\/19738"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maraahmed.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}